In this candid if carefully crafted memoir, Newsom revisits his fourth-generation San Francisco roots, lingering over the family mythology behind his political rise. After his parents’ separation, Newsom and his sister were raised by their mother, Tessa, who struggled financially; his father, William, an appellate court judge and at one time manager of the Gordon P. Getty Family Trust, remained a powerful presence. Newsom underscores the hardships that marked his youth—severe dyslexia and academic frustration—while pointing to the confidence and discipline he found on the basketball court and baseball field. Yet even as the likely presidential candidate casts himself as an underdog entrepreneur who built the PlumpJack Estate Winery and hospitality empire before entering politics, his origin story cannot entirely escape the glow of the Getty connection, which he acknowledges shadowed his rise from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to mayor and, eventually, governor. “In my life as a husband, father, and politician, the Getty connection would cloud and distort many things,” he writes. “In the eyes of the press, I was forever the ‘golden boy’ whose daddy had prospered because of his ties to the Gettys and now the son was simply following suit.” The tension between bootstrap resolve and inherited access to privilege becomes the book’s lingering subtext. Newsom surveys his record, which includes authorizing same-sex marriage in San Francisco ahead of national consensus and advancing legislation on climate policy, gun safety, and reproductive rights. He also acknowledges personal missteps, among them the collapse of his marriage to Kimberly Guilfoyle. He presents his later partnership with Jennifer Siebel and their four children as steadier ground. The memoir closes in 2024, before the next chapter of national turbulence, though he recounts a revealing 2018 meeting with President Donald Trump on Air Force One following the deadly wildfire in Paradise, California. That exchange, even more than the measured recitation of achievements, offers a sharper glimpse of the political instincts that define him.